5 years

Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle (via Peter Batty):

Clemens gave an excellent and very frank talk on "The gap between SDIs and the GeoWeb". A couple of quotes that I noted were "So far the impact of SDIs on the integration of data as a ubiquitous component of the web seems low" and "There is not evidence that SDIs have increased the market volume of government data by a significant amount". He noted that OGC web services are based largely on an architecture and approach to web services developed around 10 years ago, well before many recent web innovations.

The WxS specifications began coming out 10 years ago, but the OGC's approach certainly predates the web.

At the 2007 FOSS4G conference, Charlie Savage (not, I think, intentionally invoking Ziggy Stardust) gave the OGC's WxS architecture 5 years. It seemed ridiculous then to say even what now appears, coming from Clemens, to be conventional wisdom. What will 3 more years bring?

Comments

Re: 5 years

Author: Ron Lake

I think some of you guys are in dream land. Clemens said nothing surprising (including that it came from Clemens) - no one in the OGC would claim that WxS services meet all requirements - NOR that there has been much progress on making meaningful SDI's. At the same time the problems being dealt with are more than map making and map viewing. What the right mix of architectures will be is not clear (in my view) to anyone. I think there are many notions of the Web and all have a place - whether it is the web of hyperlinked documents or the web of access to services (transactional interactions with security) or the web of real time collaboration (a la XMPP). The OGC problem space is very large (maybe this is a problem ..) and includes things from national security to commercial aviation to emergency response to conventional map making and viewing. I am not arguing AT ALL with the importance of user generated data, nor with neo-things - JUST don't think that such a point of view is not discussed within the OGC or ISO or many other places. Be proud of the neo accomplishments yes - but don't believe they are in such a different world. They are NOT!